Seeking Enlightenment: The Spiritual
Journey of a Psychotherapist

by Catherine Morrison

Seeking
Enlightenment is both a personal and a professional memoir. It is a true story
that I began to write while practicing psychotherapy as a young adult. With a
deep interest in an evolutionary system of psychological evolution, I began the
developmental story with the infants first weeks of lifewhen he is normally,
but nevertheless psychotically oriented, not knowing inside from outsideand
moved on through progressively more healthy, but still dysfunctional states,
to the healthier neurotic stages of emotional life, and, finally, to Autonomy,
the Western ideal of health. Because I was staging development, I was drawn to
Jean Piagets cognitivestaging system, the most exacting and elegant such
system in the field, and I foundas he had predictedthat it was eminently
suitable for emotional development. However, his cognitive stages included three
plateaus; whereas, I had found only two tiers of emotional development
throughout my extensive and varied practice.

Now, I needed candidates for a third plateau. Having had an ambivalent
relationship with spirituality during most of my adult life, a three-day retreat
with the Dalai Lama had made a believer out of me, so I knew this third level
must be spiritual as His Holiness would definitely not fit on my first or second
developmental levels. I began to explore Eastern enlightenment, and after two
fruitless trips to India, looking for a guru, miraculously, my guru, Swami
Dayananda came to my hometown to give a two- day seminar to MIT students, and,
in so doing, he found me. Since that time, I regularly took courses at his
ashram in Saylorsburg, PA.

Swami Dayananda, unlike most Indian gurus I have known, was interested in
Western psychology, and as he taught me about the evolution of spirituality, I
told him about my psychological study which I called Jacobs Ladder. As he
instructed me about Eastern enlightenment, he suggested that I complete Jacobs
Ladder, by adding this Eastern component to Western psychology. He said that no
one could be fully mature without spiritual growth. He called this maturation
Ultimate Mental Health.

The ancient Vedantins sometimes used the metaphorof
a red-hot iron ball to symbolize the relationship ofconsciousness to the
human mind. The glowing red heatand the hard round metal appear as a single
entity, just asconsciousness and the mind are taken to be one. In
reality,the hot iron is a composite of fire and metal, seen as
onethrough superimposition of the two elements upon eachother. In its
finely honed teaching methodology, Vedantauses this as one metaphor to
clarify that the mind derivesits consciousness as a reflection of the unity
consciousnessin which it shines and not because it generates
consciousnesswithin itself. Though this notion of the isolated selfin a
separate body with a discrete awareness of its own isdeeply ingrained in
each of us through millennia of bodyidentification,it is false. The only
true source of consciousness is atma or Brahman,

The One-Without-A-Second.

Vedanta teaches that this source of all, being
non-dual, isthe source of consciousness that reflects in the
otherwiseinsentient cellular matter constituting our bodies as wellas
our brains. This phenomenon is compared with sunlightshining on the surface
of a lake or a mirror, making it brightby reflecting in it.

How does an essentially insentient brain,
enlivenedby reflected consciousnessbut embattled with a
self-centeredego that intuits progress along this third plateau
willbring about its destructionever make the leap from thatego-mind,
even from a prepared ego-mind, to identifywith pure consciousness and
become enlightened? What isthe progression along the third plateau? Our
society seemsto have lost the inspiration and the motivation as well
asthe map. We can look for some of all three in this chapter.The mystics
are good map-makers of their personal routestoward the Unitive Life, while
the Vedantins perfectedteaching methodology shortens the quest and
substantiallydiminishes its overwhelming anxiety. Diminished
anxietyalone increases ones capacity for receptivity to
Vedantasmessage. We can benefit from the mystics and from otherswho
record their paths toward enlightenment, and wecan learn from todays
Vedantins whose well-systematizedteaching methods still beckon seekers from
around theworld. Perhaps these models can reignite our interest
andinspire us toward our own maturational and spiritual progress,and I
feel certain they can help us find our way.

Evelyn Underhills classic Mysticism is an
importantsource of information about Western aspirants. Shestudied and
cataloged the lives of nearly a hundred individualsas they sought union with
God. She identifies fivestages, three for preparation and two for fruition.
She callsher first stage Conversion or Awakening of the Self.By
Conversion, Underhill does not mean the novice or agnosticsfirst
introduction to the notion of God. Instead, sherefers to a deep, often
sudden, shift in ones perception ofreality, like that of St. Paul on the
road to Damascus. In thisConversion, the self profoundly intuits that 1) God
is real,2) the world is a mock reality, and 3) the self is one
withdivinity. My own Conversion experience, though far lessdramatic than
St. Pauls, had the potency of a blow to thehead, leaving me dazed. It
accompanied the first completeVedanta instruction I received from Swami
Dayananda atthe MIT lecture, reorienting my thought and galvanizingmy
passion toward the single goal of God-consciousness.